This doesn't directly answer your question, but there is some silliness in the way some large companies hire contractors that typically prevents an individual c

This doesn't directly answer your question, but there is some silliness in the way some large companies hire contractors that typically prevents an individual contractor from making more (including benefits) than an employee. I know somebody who was able to work around this that I'll describe at the end of the post. Many companies prefer to hire contractors through agencies they trust or professional services companies. Sometimes this is just baked into HR policy so you can't hire an individual contractor even if you want to. I used to work for a services company that charged customers ~$225/hr for US based people with specialized expertise in a certain area. The employees would get less than 50% of that in salary, but it probably came to 50-60% of that if you added in benefits. Note that "specialized expertise" is really broad and many customers were paying premium rates for very average consultants. The customers that really needed experts cycled through a few average consultants before getting a great one. I've also been at the other end of this, being the person who was hiring through an agency who charged ~$150/hr and paid their actual contractors much less. Again, the quality of the "experts" on their end varied widely. At those rates, if you paid an individual directly you could get somebody amazing. But none of these companies were willing to do that and directly hire a great person for 75% of what they were paying a firm to do the same (or worse) work. I knew one person who found a way around this. He was part of a professional services group and was contracted to a large company for 2+ years (multiple short term contracts) and built a bunch of custom stuff for them. He was literally the only person on earth who understood what he had built. He was also really good, so you couldn't replace him easily. He had some family issues and had to quit from the services company to take care of family. The large company had no choice but to hire him directly as a contractor and give him a lot of leeway in his work schedule so he could take care of his family. He got a great rate and made that work for multiple years. I think the large company wanted to hire him as an employee, but he had no interest in getting pulled into their day-to-day politics.